A Choice of Kipling's Verse with an Essay on Rudyard Kipling

First edition. Sm. 8vo. Pp. 306, [2 (blank)]. Indigo cloth boards, titled in gilt to spine; deckled edges printed on heavy wartime paper. Top-edge purple stained, as called for. Sky-blue dustwrapper printed in red and black to spine and front [priced "8s. 6d. net" to front flap]. 1/10,120 copies printed. The first appearance of the 31-page Essay on Kipling and 123 poems with an Index of First Lines. The first U.S. edition, by Charles Scribner's Sons, came out a couple of years later.

Former ownership signature to f.f.e.p., slight browning to fore-edges, a couple of modest closed tears to edge-faded upper dust jacket panel, darkened spine, else fine.

Eliot's lengthy essay aimed at shoring up Kipling's faltering reputation – "I cannot find any justification for the charge that he held a doctrine of race superiority" – was answered in kind by George Orwell in a 1942 essay in Horizon in which he castigates the writer as a "jingo imperialist."

[Gallup B39a]